[lojban-beginners] Re: A Newbie's First Impressions

[Jay F Kominek <jkominek@miranda.org>]

On Wed, Apr 23, 2003 at 06:57:18AM -0700, Travis Garris wrote:
> I'd argue that you can be just as unambiguous in natural languages
> with less "articles".

In simple cases, yes, you can speak logician's english. That rapidly
becomes so cumbersome as to be ludicrous, however.

> Of course, as Lojban ages, I suspect that several of these strings
> of "articles" may find themselves as new words, words that purists
> may not like.

Considering that they're always usable on their own, I can't see
them accreting. Some of them would have to fall out of usefulness
when used alone.

> But this, like everyone else's comments, seems to imply that the
> active voice is preffered.  This is true in English literature, but
> in daily conversation people occassionally use the passive voice.
> Sometimes the passive is used with good reason.  We may say "The
> light can be seen from here" instead of "One can see the light from
> here".

The active/passive voice distinction doesn't make a whole lot of sense
in Lojban. The concept requires a grammatical subject, which you seem
to be saying is the first sumti of the bridi. That isn't the case.
It active/passive voice also lends special weight to the doers and
doees of an event, which is artificial to Lojban.

> There are perfectly valid sentences in English which can confuse
> native English speakers (wish I could come up with an example).

The mouse the cat the dog bit chased died.

Though in English, the criteria for validity is much more "what will
a native speaker accept as valid" rather than "what fits some rules".
Whereas in Lojban, it is "what sentences are contained in the language
described by the LALR(1) grammar."

Most of the above is now straying towards off-topicness for
lojban-beginners. Please note that I've changed the Reply-To on this
to point to the main lojban list.

-- 
Jay Kominek <jkominek@miranda.org>
And this too, shall pass.